What this West Virginian author says JD Vance gets wrong about Appalachia

When JD Vance’s memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” took off in 2016, people started talking to Neema Avashia about it.

She grew up in Appalachia. Southern West Virginia, to be more specific, but moved to Boston in 2003. Well-meaning people in her new East Coast home started telling her they understood where she grew up, based on “Hillbilly Elegy.”

But when she picked up a copy, the memoir didn’t resonate. She struggled with the book’s narratives about the people she spent the early part of her life with.

“[Vance] often went from telling his individual story to painting Appalachia with a very broad brush,” she says.

The memoir catapulted Vance onto the national stage. Now, he’s the Republican nominee for vice president after serving in the Senate. Once a never-Trumper, he shares a ticket with the former president.

“Vance’s narrative, and the people and institutions who championed it, who profited off it, are why he is Trump’s pick for vice president,” Avashia wrote in a piece for The Guardian.

Her first book is called “Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place.”

Her response to the book’s popularity

“When I read ‘Hillbilly Elegy,’ I didn't see myself reflected in it, and I don't need to. Vance's memoir is his story.

“But what I struggled with is that he often went from telling his individual story to painting Appalachia with a very broad brush and ascrib[ing] a culture of poverty narrative to the people of Appalachia. And that narrative didn't align with my experience.

“It didn't align with the experience of growing up as a child of immigrants in Appalachia. And it also didn't reflect the community that I grew up in, with white Appalachians, who were full of love and care and taught me everything I know about how to be in community with people. The deficit narrative that he was describing to people at home was one that I didn't buy.”

How her experience differs from what J.D. Vance describes in Hillbilly Elegy

“I grew up in a very different part of Appalachia. I think when people think about Appalachia, they think about coal. But Appalachia is also home to, or was home to, a really significant chemical industry, both in the area where I grew up in southern West Virginia and also in eastern Tennessee.

“The people who worked at those plants were the people in my community. And because of that, there's actually a significant Indian immigration to that part of Appalachia, because a lot of people came to work either as chemists or researchers or engineers in in the area. But also, a lot of the people in my community who were white Appalachians were sometimes the children or grandchildren of miners but had moved in to work in the chemical industry because it was a presumably safer and steadier source of income.

“And so that community where I grew up was a place where people really took care of one another. It wasn't an official town. We grew up in an unincorporated place. There was no infrastructure to speak of coming from city government. And so people understood that we were going to take care of one another, and our survival depended on one another.

“Neighbors help neighbors. If you saw someone needed something, you gave it to them because you knew that when you needed something, they were going to give it to you. And that way of being just really defines my upbringing and has defined so much of who I am as a person now.

“I think in the Vance narrative, the way he describes working-class Appalachians as lazy, as resentful of the government and resentful of industry, as not willing to work hard, as morally bankrupt in a lot of ways [is wrong]. “None of that describes my neighbors, my coaches, my teachers, my friends or the community I grew up in.”

On J.D. Vance’s record on LGBTQ rights and queer communities in Appalachia

“You can go to the smallest places in Appalachia and you will find queer people there. I've been in the tiniest towns and libraries and bookstores, and I cannot tell you how many times queer youth come up to me and tell me that my book is the first time they felt seen, that they feel connected, that they feel less lonely.

“Queer people are everywhere, and that includes Appalachia. And actually the queer people who I know in Appalachia are some of the bravest, strongest people I know because they fight every day to make Appalachia a place that's home for everyone.

“And so when the legislatures in West Virginia and Kentucky are ignoring the major issues around foster care and infrastructure in order to make [transgender] youth their sort of whipping boy, it's really painful. The rhetoric that exists around queer people in Appalachia is a rhetoric that kills. And it absolutely ignores the fact that there are so many queer people in Appalachia who deserve the solidarity and care of people outside Appalachia.

“That erasure absolves people outside of Appalachia of needing to fight for people in Appalachia. So if we say that we believe in LGBTQ rights, we don't believe in them everywhere else except Appalachia. We're fighting for them there as well.”

What she wants elected officials from Appalachia to do

“So many of the issues in our nation, they're not theoretical in Appalachia. They are coming down incredibly hard. Climate change-induced flooding hit eastern Kentucky two years ago and people are still living in their cars and haven't gotten the resources that they need in order to recover. Mass incarceration is a massive issue in our country, and central Appalachia is the heart of global mass incarceration. More people are incarcerated in that region than anywhere else on Earth. The substance use disorder crisis in our country is tremendous, and it is hitting hardest in Appalachia. West Virginia has the highest overdose rate of any state in the country.

“And so what I would like to see from representatives is them taking up those issues and really working with people in communities to address those issues and find solutions instead of, in the case of J.D. Vance, taking money from Big Pharma, which is the very entity that has propagated the substance use disorder crisis in Appalachia.

“I want people who are fighting for the people of Appalachia, not exploiting them further and not taking money from the entities that exploit them.”

Gabrielle Healy produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Todd Mundt. Healy adapted it for the web.